"My Little CoPS:Friendship is International Politics and the Constant Threat of Nuclear Annhilation"

Not to be confused with COPS (the live-action reality TV series) or COPS (the animated television series).

The Coalition of Ponyist States (CoPS) is an RP Group on the NationStates forums. The nations in CoPS RP the existence of ponies, as seen in the TV Show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic; however, these ponies have broken themselves out of the Sugar Bowl that they lived in, and have come into a world where they are face to face with the same challenges that humanity faces today, with others piled at their side.

The Coalition of Ponyist States was originally founded jointly on August 2, 2011 by Enatai and Urmanian. At this point, the idea of Pony based RP had only just begun. However, over time, the idea of the pony species living alongside humanity, and many previously other established species that inhabit NationStates. Roleplay slowly established the pony nations as a permanant fixture of NationStates. While in the beginning of CoPS history, the vast majority of storylines were dealing with nations that attempted to commit genocide on the pony species, CoPS RP has begun to switch over to interaction with other groups of Role Players, as well as gained a focus on developing the relations between the various nations of the Coalition.

In character:

The origin of the Pony species is shrouded in mystery. Some say that they evolved the same way as humans, while other say the Regal Sisters—Celestia and Luna—created the ponies in their own image. Whatever the reason, the races of ponies have spread across the world, and now live alongside humans, elves, saurians, and all other forms of life that inhabit the NationStates world.

The pony species Equus sapiens is divided into three subspecies— all of which can interbreed freely.

Earth Ponies (Equus sapiens terrestris) till the land, and their skills help to nurture the soil to produce bountiful crops.

Pegasus Ponies (Equus sapiens volaticus) who control the weather and fly in the sky

Unicorn Ponies (Equus sapiens rinocerotis) who can perform magical abilities such as telekinesis.

Perhaps Ponyism's hat is their universal devotion to the 'Elements of Harmony'. Just like in Real Life while almost all ponies and ponyists agree on the existence and names of the Elements of Harmony, anything beyond that is open to debate.

This Roleplay contains examples of:

Daffy Dill: her eccentric personality seems to not influence (or possibly be the reason for) a number of plots regarding her "rescue" by a number of male characters.

Twilight Sparkle: this goes without saying.

Derpy Hooves: her clumsiness, eccentricity, and love of muffins all appear to be the reason why the Church of Muffins worships her specifically as a prophetess.

Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Multiple nations have airborne aircraft carriers (and battleships!) justified through the use of Magitek or very vague scientific explanations of quantum physics and atmospheric buoyancy.

Alike and Antithetical Adversaries: Specifically, the "Heterogenous Heroes vs. Homogenous Villains" variety; while the member nations/players of the CoPS are actually quite diverse in their IC implementations - ranging from far-left to far-right (and quite literally everything in between) to even corporatocracies and anarchies, with a wide variety of political structures - the anti-pony alliances opposing the CoPS tend to be rather homogenous, with nearly all members being totalitarian regimes of either the communist or fascist varieties.

Altum Videtur: The YellowApplan-made aerospace platforms defending HideaBerry Island are named after the Latin translations of the Elements of Harmony.

Amazon Brigade: Happens quite a bit with pony armies; though subverted or averted entirely in many cases, a large number of pony characters tend to be female, and this will occasionally be reflected in military scenarios.

YellowApple uses female pilots near-exclusively in recon fighters, since the cramped spaces are more suitable for a smaller female pilot than they are for a larger male pilot. The rest of the YellowApplan armed forces is quite male-dominated, however, even with pony personnel.

A Million Is a Statistic: Being a NationStates roleplay, quite common. Most nations care little for the lives of their people, even alleged democratic states are willing to throw their nation into war (even a nuclear one) regularily. Overlaps with Easy Logistics as armies of millions are sent thousands of kilometers on a semi-regular basis.

Heaven help you if you decide to take on a unified CoPS. Though now a pony-killing regime is outright ignored OOCly, in times past it would result in the entirety of the Coalition coming down upon a nation and, if not utterly destroying it, cripping it quite severely.

Fantoa's pony genocide was met with a joint invasion by YellowApple and the Holy Marsh culminating in YellowApplan martial law until a non-genocidal and pro-Ponyist government was instated.

The TurtleShroomian Dark Harvest was met by an invasion by none other than C'Tan. However, in contrast to other examples of this trope, the TurtleShroomers launched a nuclear-equipped Saturn V rocket at the C'Tani invasion force, which - although certainly not doing much real damage - prompted the C'Tani invaders to retreat momentarily, though not without the defending forces having already been annihilated.

Fantastic Racism: Many humans find the existence of ponies distasteful. Reactions to them have ranged from denying the existince of ponies, to launching campaigns of mass genocide.

Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Given the existence of magic (or a scientific explanation thereof) throughout the CoPS, this trope tends to run rampant in CoPS RPs, which may involve anything from saccharine magical ponies to all-consuming grey goo to Satan incarnate and everything in between.

The YellowApple, Inc. BitTrigger normally results in this for infantrystallions which use it, though it's capable of being "unlocked" so the attached rifle can be manipulated as if a humanoid were holding it, making this a subversion in some cases.

Lubyakan and Orussian assault guns also take this approach, mounting a single cannon For Massive Damage.

Basically what the majority of pony-killing/enslaving/maiming/hating "in-character" threads boil down to, considering that the justifications tend to be strawman arguments at best. Some anti-pony players are starting to formulate more legitimate reasons to be anti-pony, but the majority continue to fall quite painfully into this trope.

New Freedomstan gets applauded for playing this trope 'straight' with some of its Equine Research Stations.

Full-Frontal Assault: Many ponies "don't normally wear clothes", and thus will fill this trope when they fight as such, though not exactly for the same reasons as most other examples of the trope do.

Greater Pony Herd v. Lubyak. Nearly escalated to nuclear war, and discussion of potential nuclear exchange still continues. A non-canonical RP does exist detailing the events of such a war were it to have actually occurred.

Hippostania v. every nation remotely left-leaning. Hippostania's repeated oppression of any ideology short of center-right has often made it the target of political disdain from much of the rest of the CoPS. This is compounded by the accusations that the pony population - despite being a numerical minority - possesses power over the human majority, given that a proportionately small number of humans actually hold positions of significant political power (though some do).

In fact, OOC attitude problems with the player behind Hippostania over this issue and other RP-related disagreements have recently led the CoPS to remove Hippostania from the alliance and roleplay a nuclear attack against it.

Fun with Acronyms: GHEYSECS, an acronym standing for the members of one of two sub-alliances of the CoPS (Greater Pony Herd, Hippostania, Enatai, YellowApple, Shrilland (?), Earth Sphere Coalition, Crystal Spires).

Girl-on-Girl Is Hot: Lesbianism and bisexuality among female characters is a recurring motif in many CoPS RPs. This may just be because the majority of players are male, and are not above writing their own Fanservice.

Most "encrypted" communiques are merely specified to be encrypted, instead of actual details on the encryption method used. This is mostly to Hand Wave very-hard-to-decrypt messages, since providing a real-life encryption method/algorithm would allow more tech-saavy players an advantage in explaining how they'd decrypt the message.

Crystal Spires averts this trope by actually encrypting messages.

Joisey: The Reformed Republican Union of Orlkjestad is portrayed as the first form, complete with Armani suits.

Loads and Loads of Characters: True of quite a few NationStates roleplays. Though many RPs are sane enough to only involve a couple of major characters, this trope is taken to the extreme in larger roleplays involving more than two players (such as in the CoPS, where you start to encounter dozens of players, each introducing multiple major characters and even more minor named characters).

Men Are the Expendable Gender: Happens quite often; males are more likely to be physically injured and/or killed than females in most combat-oriented RPs. Ties in quite a bit with Men Are Generic, Women Are Special, given that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is already female-oriented, leading to the CoPS naturally following in its footsteps. There are numerous subversions and aversions, of course (this being NationStates, but numerous instances of the trope being played straight as well.

Minovsky Physics: Pony "magic" is quickly becoming this if it hasn't already (rather than being Applied Phlebotinum or Hand Wave), with loads and loads of scientific concepts coming into play - including quantum physics (unicorn magic / pegasus flight / grabbing things with hooves), neuroscience (cutie marks / cutie pox), genetics engineering and evolution (how Equus sapiens came to be), nanorobotics (the Smooze), and many other topics - in order to make for a believable concept rather than rely on Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Other players just say A Wizard Did It and don't go into details.

Nuke 'em: Standard threat of many nations in many situations. Rarely used.

Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Like in many works of fiction, scientists RPed by the CoPS and the players thereof have a tendency to be proficient in a variety of mostly-unrelated disciplines, resulting in either this trope or Renaissance Man.

The Political Officer: New Freedomstan uses Commissars of the, "Cowards and traitors will be SHOT!" variety, although actual field-executions are rare (outside of the Penal Divisions). Their purpose is mostly about maintaining civilian power over the armed forces, however, with morale being the secondary priority.

Principles Zealot: The Beastling State of Crystal Spires, and their leader, Maven Auryn, tend to stick to their principles even at the cost of starting a major war, and/or being invaded.

Luna and Celestia fit this trope to the letter, except that they're older than that.

YellowApple's Administrator Amarillo Manzano is somewhere between this and standard Older Than They Look. Future Administrator Fostera "Frankie" Manzano, being an alicorn like Luna and Celestia, is also expected to fill this trope.

Chancellor Maven Auryn of Crystal Spires is well over a thousand, and still going strong.

Retired Badass: The RRUO used to be a really active enforcer of anti-slaver actions, to the point of sending Armada ships into international waters. Since then, there's been a coup, the reign of a dictator, a a gruesome civil war, and a quite inept interim government. Now, the RRUO would much rather mind its own business and be busy with growing a flower garden than a war overseas, but if you attack or start to beat another nation in the CoPS (Except Lubyak and Crystal Spires), Orlkjestad would be glad to pull a Neutral No Longer, and if you attack the RRUO itself, even just a single speck of sand on the most worthless island in the nation, may God/Celestia havemercy onyour soul. And, to add to all this, President Leon Palantine is working onchanging this status.

Ridiculously Cute Critter: Even though Coalition RPs tend to be darker and more grim than anything seen on the show, these are still nations inhabited with pastel colored ponies at heart, and there are many characters that can be described as 'D'AWWWW'.

Became a major point of contention in rivalry between Imeriata and other pony nations which eventually lead to them leaving when many of the members signed the Amistad Declaration, which declared a state of war against all slaver nations.

YellowApple also managed a massive liberation in an impressive manner which nearly put itself into bankruptcy to atone itself for its prior life as a slaver nation.

Schizo Tech: Like the universe of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the CoPS has a variety of technologies that normally wouldn't accompany one another. This is especially prevalent when comparing nations that generally play the source material's technology relatively straight (such as the Greater Pony Herd) against nations which are significantly advanced technologically and typically will not implement "past-tech" technologies (such as YellowApple). Similarly, not all players use the same approach of validating pony "magic"; while the players behind Princess Luna and Crystal Spires, for example, stay toward the "magical" end of the explanation spectrum, others - such as the players behind YellowApple and Behntasha - go for the "scientific" end.

The Schizo Tech has led to a new classification of technology, 'Pony Tech' has begun to be implemented, which attempts to combine the magic inherent in ponies and modern technology.

The player behind YellowApple uses preformatted text to indicate radio chatter. His use of "YellowApplan" grammatical/punctuation/spelling rules in spoken text also partially fits this trope, as it's often used as an indication that the speaker is speaking in YellowApplan English.

Tailed Wind Demons assigns text colors to characters for use in their speech.

C'tan and Menelmacar slaughter millions in the name of putting an end to slavery.

New Freedomstan claims to be this. YMMV wether they are or not.

We ARE Struggling Together: The Coalition claims to be an 'alliance'. However, more often than not the energies of the various nations are directed less at supporting ponyism around the world, and more at sniping at fellow Coalition states. However, when something gets the entire Coalition to band together, the results are terrifying indeed.

YellowApple is famous for stepping in the way of the rest of the CoPS in their attempts to exterminate entire civilizations for crimes of a minority population thereof. Crystal Spires does the same due to laws in Forntian Idealism.

Averted with the Greater Pony Herd, as evidenced with the lack of hesitation in slaughtering men, women, and children alike solely to make an example out of a nation.

Used once upon a time by anti-pony factions to degrade the Ponyist movement explaining that ponies don't actually exist but are merely hallucinations and/or psychological constructs, and that perceiving their existence and/or perceiving oneself to be a pony is indicative of psychological illness.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy